Hirsi Ali relates her experiences as a Muslim woman so that oppressed Muslim women can take heart and seek their own liberation. Threatened by the same group that slew van Gogh, Hirsi Ali now has round-the-clock protection, but has not allowed these circumstances to compromise her fierce criticism of the treatment of Muslim women, of Islamic governments’ attempts to silence any questioning of their traditions, and of Western governments’ blind tolerance of practices such as genital mutilation and forced marriages of female minors occurring in their countries. In November 2004, the violent murder on an Amsterdam street of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, with whom Hirsi Ali had written a film about women and Islam called Submission, changed her life. There, she learned Dutch, worked as an interpreter in abortion clinics and shelters for battered women, earned a college degree, and started a career in politics as a Dutch parliamentarian But it is also the courageous story of how Hirsi Ali herself fought back against everyone who tried to force her to submit to a traditional Muslim woman’s life and how she became a voice of reform.īorn in Somalia and raised Muslim, but outraged by her religion’s hostility toward women, Hirsi Ali escaped an arranged marriage to a distant relative and fled to the Netherlands. It is a defiant call for clear thinking and for an Islamic Enlightenment.

Hard-hitting, outspoken, and controversial, The Caged Virgin is a call to arms for the emancipation of women from a brutal religious and cultural oppression and from an outdated cult of virginity.

So asserts Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s profound meditation on Islam and the role of women, the rights of the individual, the roots of fanaticism, and Western policies toward Islamic countries and immigrant communities. Muslims who explore sources of morality other than Islam are threatened with death, and Muslim women who escape the virgins’ cage are branded whores.

The caged virgin